Joan Rivers

Regular appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” and many other comedy and variety television shows made Joan Rivers a household name in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the following decades Rivers has clung to that fame tenaciously, updating her image and her act to keep up with the times. At 78, she's still shocking audiences with a bawdy stand-up routine that mocks American mores (and, just as often, herself), keeping a schedule that many comedians half her age would be hard-pressed to match. The 2010 documentary <i>Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work</i> offered an appreciation of Rivers, detailing her intense work ethic and arguing that her blunt comedy opened doors for a subsequent generation of crass female stand-ups.